LETTERS for August 6 issue

August 6, 2009

West Maui residents who currently enjoy the peaceful, residential neighborhood of Kahana need to know that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is proposing to build an enormous regional church that will disrupt the peace and privacy of many Kahana residents and visitors.

The property they are planning to use is makai of Honoapiilani Highway one-half-mile north of Kahana Center. It borders several residential subdivisions and is currently zoned as agricultural.

LDS proposes to build this huge church to serve two Lahaina wards with a combined congregation of approximately 650 members. Ninety percent of this congregation lives south of Kahana, and church activities are planned to be held throughout the week beginning at 6 a.m. and continuing until 9 p.m. If this immense church is allowed to be built as currently planned, the tremendous increase in traffic and the dangerous access intersection will potentially require yet another West Maui stop light.

A community information meeting regarding this proposed project will be held on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 7 p.m. in the cultural hall of the Lahaina Latter-day Saints Church at 1594 Malo St. in the Wahikuli area of Lahaina.

If you value the peace and quiet, the present beautiful mountain and ocean views, the privacy, the “rural” residential atmosphere, and the lack of traffic congestion, noise and activity, then please attend this meeting to let LDS and its development company know how you feel. A more appropriate site for this church can surely be found. We need to save Kahana!

KARIN & GEORGE WATSON, Kahana

CHECK THE FACTS BEFORE LEGALIZING MARIJUANA

Many of our citizens are pushing for the legalization of marijuana. Their contention is that “it does not lead to the use of dangerous drugs.” Be careful what you wish for.

Some of the many crystal meth addicts say they got hooked on this horrible drug while using marijuana.

I suggest that you do a lot of research before legalizing it. There’s enough information out there that is available to you.

GORDON C. COCKETT, Lahaina

HAD ENOUGH OF OBAMA YET?

Obama’s “Porkulous” Bill, with 1,400 pages no one read, passed in eight hours because it was such an emergency. It was $786 billion of your money!

He said for any bill that came across his desk, he would “go over line by line” and eliminate any “pork” (one of many lies). Any bill proposed would be placed online for five days for the public to review it before signing (another lie). This bill would halt unemployment. (We all know what happened.)

Obama’s worldwide “Apology Tour?” The guy occupying the Oval Office makes trips to half-a-dozen countries, never once mentioning the blood of American soldiers and the generosity of the American people in aiding the poor and oppressed of the world. Instead, he apologizes for America being America. In fact, I have NEVER heard Obama once say how great this great country is. I truly believe he has a deep resentment of this great country and despises those who have worked hard for their wealth. After all, he wants to take from those who have worked hard and GIVE it to those who don’t.

Then there’s the Cambridge, Massachusetts, incident involving his good buddy, Harvard Professor Gates. The good professor was the one making the racist remarks, evident by no less than two police reports and an audio tape taken by Sgt. Crawley. Obama’s remarks that the Cambridge Police Department acted “stupidly” set back race relations in this country 40 years. Besides the fact that the President of the United States should not be commenting on local police issues, he sure should have checked the facts before flying off the handle. And the Obama goes on...

CHRISTOPHER EDWARDS, Lahaina

REMOVE ABORTION FROM HEALTH CARE LEGISLATION

Current proposed Health Care Reform legislation will result in the biggest expansion of abortion since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision in 1973. There is no explicit exclusion for abortion; instead it opens the door to allow, or even force, abortion to be included as health care coverage.

Abortion is not a health care benefit but an elective, and it should never be included in health care legislation. If abortion is not specifically excluded, it will automatically become a mandate or required benefit, leaving the American taxpayer with no choice.

I am not in favor of subsidizing abortion, and I do not believe the government should be forcing its citizens to pay for abortion.

I am urging you to contact your representatives and senators and ask them to see that abortion is excluded from health care legislation. Also ask them to vote “no” on any health care bill that does not include language that specifically excludes abortion. The next step is to look into all of the other flaws in the Health Care Reform legislation.

BARBARA J. FERRARO, Concerned Women for America, Hilo

SHOWS ARE OUT OF CONTROL

I am writing this because what is appearing in our mainstream entertainment media — television, movies, newspapers and radio — is ultimately the responsibility of each American.

Many Americans have children and extended family. As Americans, we need to take part in this society. It is important that truthful information come through our news outlets.

It is also important that reasonable material intended for the proper audiences make it to their intended participants.

If demented, intellectually twisted, paranoid, drug-induced and anger-fueled information is being allowed to be disseminated with the voice of reason, then it would be no surprise to find that it is a source of much of the anger, resentment and discontent in modern American society.

Why allow this to happen and to continue to hold sway over our entertainment, information and news networks?

If there was a nasty person standing on the street corner telling lies to you, your family and friends, wouldn’t you want something done about it?

Why, then, allow them access to your home, or to sneak into your neighbor’s home unannounced without question or comment?

Many cable companies today assert that the content that they broadcast into American homes cannot be regulated or put under any scrutiny — that they are completely free to broadcast whatever information they like, because they are not sending their signals through public airwaves.

Just because the programs, data and information are sent through cables does not change the fact that they are bound by the same laws and restrictions put upon television and radio companies broadcasting freely into the atmosphere.

The industry has grown large enough, and is profitable enough, for any reasonable person to contend that it is time for it to be regulated by common sense regulations, reflect human values when possible, and fulfill the broader demand of television — it should, when possible, “instruct and inform.”

At this time, cable television has not only avoided providing competent instruction and meaningful information, it continues to disseminate wrong and incomplete instruction, to the point of lying by omission or intent, and is proliferating misinformation at an alarming rate.

Rather than the horrors portrayed by George Orwell in “1984” emanating from the government, in this case, the web of lies, deceit and ignorance being weaved is being produced by the American “entertainment” industry — and at a hefty profit.

Take hacks, charlatans, windy talkers, liars and cheats, add in some drugs and bizarre sexual behavior, and you have a volatile mix of personalities and individuals who might be suited to produce a successful strip show in the red light district of some big city... but now they have access to the television, radio and newspaper media, which allows their perverted, jaundiced and skewed view of the world to be beamed at light speed into the homes of nearly every single American in the United States.

ALFRED BROCK, Via E-mail

GLOBAL WARMING PROPONENTS USE FALSE TEMPERATURE READINGS

For many years, thousands of scientists and other technical people have stated that humans do not cause global warming. Nature does.

The official record of temperatures in the U.S.A. comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service. Anthony Watts, a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran, recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photograph more than 860 of these stations. They were shocked to find that 89 percent of the stations failed to meet the requirement that stations must be 100 feet or more away from artificial heating, radiating and reflecting heat sources.

Even worse, they found major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites. Their conclusion was that the U.S. temperature record is unreliable and should not be used to promote unsubstantiated global warming theories. Much more information is available at www.surfacestations.org.